March 26 2020 - Losing Smell and Taste

I found out yesterday that one of the symptoms of the COVID-19 virus is losing one's sense of taste and smell.  Doctors are adding this to the list of screening tools. The condition of losing one's smell and taste is known as anosmia.  It can be caused by head injury, infection, or blockage of the nose.  Approximately 1 in 8 Americans over the age of 40 have this problem.  It is also known as smell blindness, or being 'nose blind'. When people have an absence of smell at birth, it often takes a few years before they realize the absence, and tell their parents. Smell and taste are considered a pleasure experience.  The absence of these mean the distinctions and differences of smell and flavours are lost.  This, according to one doctor: "When you lose your sense of smell, your whole sense of food flavor is distorted and diminished," Cowart says. "You can still taste the basic tastes which are sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami or savory. What you're missing are the sort of subtle distinctions, the difference between strawberry and banana; between chocolate and vanilla." Smell and taste has a safety aspect: There are also the warning things that keep people safe.  Is the milk sour, is something burning on the stove, is there a gas leak?   There are other medical conditions involved in smell:  There is the partial loss of smell - hyposmia.  More serious to me is Paraosmia - the illusion or hallucination of a smell - usually a bad odour such as drains or faeces.   The medically therapeutic potential of aromas has been proven in scientific studies.   Papers have been published since the 1920's outlining the effects of essential oils on the nervous system, and their influences on moods and emotions.  In 1998, patients with advanced dementia were the subject of a controlled experiment using diffused lavender oil, and it was effective in improving 60 percent of patients' behaviour compared with the placebo.  Lavender is well-known as a relaxant, and bees have been observed to fall asleep in lavender plants.  The science of aroma-chology is dedicated to the study of the interrelationship between psychology and fragrance technology to elicit a variety of specific feelings and emotions. This seems to me to explain the many different smells we have in every day products - from cleaners, air fresheners, soaps, and skin care products to paper. There are so many synthetic fragrances that fragrance-free is a phrase that implies non-toxic living.  So as we move into Spring, we move into flowers - some fragrant some not, and definitely with a benefit of Emotional Value, as outlined below.

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March 25 - The Song is Ending

CBC interviewed REM band member Mike Mills on the weekend.  The hit End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) came out in 1987 and became a satiric and defiant anthem.  So 30 years on, it has come back into the social consciousness and is being played again. What did I find most compelling in the interview?  He and Michael Stipe wrote the music first, then gave it to Peter Buck to write the lyrics, and this is what he came up with. They had no idea this music was going to say this much.   So while this song is about the 'ending', I started to wonder about how songs conclude.  What kind of endings are there? Some of the songs we were singing in the choir have a little 'hmm', 'ooh' or 'ahh' to signal the end, a sort of fade out.  And some come to a leaping big chord and just stop.  These are pretty fun to sing.  We're singing a sort of Celtic orientation/religious/inspirational set of songs. What comes to my mind on the thumping last chord songs? Oscar Peterson and his big endings.  I found this description of his version of West Side Story's Tonight (1962): "Tonight swings mightily right from the downbeat. Peterson twists the melody and trades lines with bassist Ray Brown as drummer Ed Thigpen lightly stabs and jostles the duo with his sympathetic brush work. And then there’s the big pay-off — chorus after chorus of burning swing, round after round of exuberantly shouted choruses, and finally, a stop-time ending." What are the most famous and enduring song endings? In our time, it is an easy answer: the Beatles ending for A Day in the Life.  "Following the second crescendo, the song ends with a sustained chord, played on several keyboards, that rings for over forty seconds. " This ending is considered to have made history and is the  #1  popular song endings.  For classical songs, the #1 ending is Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 – IV. I haven't looked at the most interesting song ending lyrics, or the songs with long endings.  There likely are more variants on endings - that's for another day.  We likely have lots ahead. Yesterday's weather was too cold for me to garden, so I created spring with some spring flower photo processing.

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The Frog Princess

It is time now for the Frog Princess.  I found out yesterday about the fairy tale classification system.  This is type 402 - animal bride - in the ATU Index. "The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index) is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies. The ATU Index is the product of a series of revisions and expansions by an international group of scholars: Originally composed in German by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1910); the index was translated into English, revised, and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson (1928, 1961); and later further revised and expanded by German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther (2004). The ATU Index, along with Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932) (with which it is used in tandem) is an essential tool for folklorists." ~Wikipedia "The king (or an old peasant woman, in Lang's version) wants his three sons to marry. To accomplish this, he creates a test to help them find brides. The king tells each prince to shoot an arrow. According to the King's rules, each prince will find his bride where the arrow lands. The youngest son's arrow is picked up by a frog. The king assigns his three prospective daughters-in-law various tasks, such as spinning cloth and baking bread. In every task, the frog far outperforms the two other lazy brides-to-be. In some versions, the frog uses magic to accomplish the tasks, and though the other brides attempt to emulate the frog, they cannot perform the magic. Still, the young prince is ashamed of his frog bride until she is magically transformed into a human princess." Can you imagine being considered the heroine because of the ability to perform household tasks for a King.  What does he need a daughter-in-law servant for?   There's the core of fairy tale lessons:  innocence, beauty and virtue are valued as the attribute a woman should possess (and passivity is good too). Ambition is evil and possessed by witches and stepmothers. I read this article by Dr. Silima Nanda   "The Portrayal of Women in the Fary Tales" and had to admit it was discouraging to find out about social and cultural values through the centuries.  Rather than dwell on the past, the index of tales is fascinating  - I found the index HERE.  It starts with animal tales and progresses through to people tales. For example, ATU 425 - Beauty and the beast ATU 440 - The Frog King ATU 510A - Cinderella Our pictures for today are our Spring stories - what's blooming in the garden yesterday.

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